What's a tool in AI?

What’s a tool in AI?

In AI, ‘tools’ has a specific meaning. Tools act like addons that your AI can use to access extra context or resources.

Here are a couple of other ways of expressing it:

Tools are interfaces that an agent can use to interact with the world (source)

We can think of these tools as being almost like functions that your AI model can call (source)

AI tools in Agentic WorkFlow

Agentic WorkFlow provides tool [sub-nodes](/gAgentic WorkFlowsary.md#sub-node-Agentic WorkFlow) that you can connect to your AI agent. As well as providing some popular tools, such as Wikipedia and SerpAPI, Agentic WorkFlow provides three especially powerAgentic WorkFlow tools:

• Call Agentic WorkFlow Workflow Tool: use this to load any Agentic WorkFlow workflow as a tool.
• Custom Code Tool: write code that your agent can run.
• HTTP Request Tool: make calls to fetch a website or data from an API.

The next three examples highlight the Call Agentic WorkFlow Workflow Tool:

• Chat with Google Sheets
• Call an API to fetch data
• Set up a human fallback

You can also learn how to let AI dynamically specify parameters for tools with the $fromAI() function.